Down With Indians

July 8, 2013
 Woke up this morning thinking about the Top Secret Writer's take on The Lone Ranger going down in flames this past weekend:

"The western film, by its very nature, is weighed down with historicity. It is inescapable even in fantasy westerns. However, you dont have to front load your film with it by adding Custer clones and gatling gun massacres of innocent Indians."
—The Top Secret Writer

  It dawned on me the reason Hollywood writers go there—Custer related cavalry atrocities—is because they want to show they are down with Native Americans. Down, as in, solid with the brothers. From their point of view, to not acknowledge the genocide and tell a story of the West is morally wrong. Okay, we've been on that theme for about forty years now and at some point we need to get past it. Can we? Well, I have to give a shoutout to Quentin Tarrantino, who has done just that as it relates to slavery and the N-word with Django Unchained. Talk about going into the teeth of a taboo subject. And you even have a black villain: Samuel L. Jackson as the House N-person (see, I don't have the courage or the balls to go where Quentin and Louis CK go. Brave, brave guys). And isn't it ironic that they are brave but that cooking gal lost her entire career over the word. I haven't heard her transgression so I don't have the context, but if she told a joke with the N-word in it, I can play you entire routines of Louis CK where he says it over and over, until, well, until it loses its sting, which is his point, I believe.

Anyway, isn't it racist to judge whether a person can use certain words based on the color of their skin?

  I am down with Indians, but the living, breathing kind. The ones who are petty, savage, talented and hilarious. You know, real people.

"Yes, Indians were savage. They just met a tribe who was more savage than they were."
—Old Anglo Philosopher